Why This Surprising Mulch Is Better Than Straw

This is definitely the strangest thing I’ve done in the garden so far. Come with me for a day in the garden getting ready for spring and mulching with something you’ve probably never heard of!

An experiment in onion spacing:
https://www.vegetableacademy.com/post/an-experiment-in-onion-spacing

Purple seed trays:
Ultimate Backyard Gardener Bundle

Rain barrel:
https://gardenerssupplycompany.pxf.io/3JdvBk

Retractable hose reel:
https://shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=1966261&u=3375618&m=122144&urllink=&afftrack=

My favorite garden beds:
https://epicgardening.superfiliate.com/THECOTTAGEPEACH5

Vertical planters:
https://tinyurl.com/ycxp4cuy

My favorite seeds:
https://shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=250954&u=3375618&m=28945&urllink=&afftrack=

Instagram:
http://instagram.com/thecottagepeach

TikTok:
http://tiktok.com/@thecottagepeach

Garden Girls Podcast:
https://www.youtube.com/@gardengirlspod

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#gardeningtips #gardenvlog #homegrown #growyourownfood

It’s a big puttering day today in the garden. This is that time of year where I just have a million and one tiny things to take care of. So, I thought I would take you with me. I’ve been having some really great discussions with you guys in the community tab about the kind of content I’m going to be creating for you over the next year. And I was honestly really surprised by how many of you said that you’re here to listen to my thoughts and you’re not necessarily watching the garden content happening. You’re listening while you’re doing other things. I’m curious if that’s true for you if if you weren’t a part of that previous discussion. It’s weird, right? Because when you’re in your own head, you take your thoughts for granted and it it can feel like you don’t have anything interesting to say. And from my perspective, a lot of what’s going on in my mind is just worrying cuz I have anxiety. I think that’s one of the really incredible things about gardening though and a lot of why it’s used in a lot of social programs for personal development because it really is a great way to build confidence. But like I think it’s important to note that just because I have the guts to talk about it on the internet doesn’t mean I have any idea what I’m doing or a heck of a lot of confidence in what I’m doing either. I worry that I’ve planted things too late or too early, that I’ve given something too much water or not enough, too much fertilizer or not enough. And yes, it gets easier over time the more you grow a certain thing, but different elements of your climate can change. You can have a colder winter, a drier summer. You can think you’ve got something under control with a bunch of cardboard and mulch and then find that it is still full of weeds the next summer. And that is all just a part of the process for me. I truly don’t believe any one person has a green thumb. I think every gardener has their failures. Just like every author gets turned down a million times before they get their book deal, right? Like when we’re starting to learn how to grow plants, we’re going to have failures. And those failures are really just lessons. And at the end of the day, as long as I’ve gotten out into the garden and just kind of been more mindful and more intentional about how I’m spending my time and moving my body, I feel like I’m doing something right, even if nothing grows. I’m trying to find a way to give you guys more content that isn’t super energy intensive for me. I’m 3 and 1/2 months out from my surgery for my endometriosis excision. I’m feeling really good. It’s helped a lot and I’m so grateful for that. But I still feel like I’ve had a lot of deconditioning happen. Not just from recovering from the surgery, but prior to that, just being in pain so often, not being able to move as much as I would like. So, it’s this balance of how do I continue to do what I love by connecting with you guys while also respecting the limits that my body has. So, we were talking about whether I should do these vlogs where you just kind of have ASMR nature sounds in the background and I’m not talking to you. But you guys really like it when I’m talking to you. So, I’m not sure if that’s the direction we’re going to end up going. I was kind of thinking it might be fun to start doing maybe book reviews, like gardening books. I have a huge stack of gardening books and I don’t really see a lot of creators doing reviews like that and I love reading. So, it might be interesting, but let me know what you think. We’re about to hit the very busiest season in the garden where I’m planting every single day. And at this point, I just want to kind of get things cleaned up and ready to go. Have some seeds to plant. I’m gonna transplant the onions today, although they’re still a little bit smaller than I would like. So, just to turn you around, like I’m sitting in my chair enjoying this beautiful warm, sunny morning, but I’m also like looking over here and it’s giving me a heart attack. So, I’ve had a few people be really confused by this, and I know I don’t address it super often. This is all one property. This is not like my neighbor’s fence. This is a fence that connects to the pool that’s on this property. So that’s my house and then my parents house is over there. I’m not going to really show you it for privacy reasons, but this fence is still part of the property. So I’ve had some people be like, “Well, if you’re dealing with weeds on this side, like dig a trench and make it your neighbor’s problem or my my neighbors are my parents, so it’s not really it’s everybody’s problem.” And that’s fine. So this area has been overrun by mugwart. We put a huge layer of thick wood chips and cardboard down. Did absolutely nothing. So then I was thinking, all right, I’ll just plant a bunch of melons here. And it was fine. And then the mugwart came back anyway. But then I was thinking, well, mugwart, whatever. We’ll just leave it alone and we’ll put in these elderberry bushes and they’ll grow super fast, super big, and hopefully out compete at least some of this mug wart. But now I’m just I don’t know. I still have the cattle panel here from the cattle panel greenhouse which is 16 ft long. It’s huge. There’s nowhere else I can store it. Bunch of leaves to rake up. Our kayak. Some old corn that needs to be pulled up. My broken cold frame. Like this area is just not looking super good. And these are the other elderberries I got to get in over here somehow. I have never wanted my garden to look perfect. I think it adds a tendency to because it’s so structured because I use the elevated raised beds for accessibility reasons. I like kind of wild soft edges to a garden and I don’t really have a lot of opportunity to do that. This kind of area would be a great opportunity for that if it weren’t so overrun with this mug wart. And I’m honestly at a loss of what else to do. I don’t know what else to do. There is a reason why these invasives thrive along property lines and fence lines. Birds like to sit on the fence and they like to poop where they sit. So, we have a lot more opportunity. That’s why you see poison ivy along fences a lot of the time for things to grow that we don’t want growing there. And at this point, it’s really just become keep the area from getting worse versus like actually make it look nice. I have tried to till this area. I have tried hand pulling every single piece of mugwart. We’ve tried deep mulching. I I don’t know. I don’t know what else to do. So, I generally just ignore this area. I am going to get the elderberry in though. And I do have a whole video going into planting elderberry from last fall when I did those first two that are in there. So, I will link that for you. Inside the greenhouse, you’ll have to forgive the fan noises in here cuz I did move some of the seedlings. So, I had them on this table and I started getting really concerned cuz if you saw my tomato planting video where we outpotted them last week, I’m not sure they’re going to get big enough at time. So, I decided on top of really blasting them with some warm casting tea. I’m also going to put them on a grow light again. Theoretically, I shouldn’t need one in here, like there’s tons of natural sunlight, but you know, we get cloudy days, too. So, I just think it’s best to do it this way. So, I just kind of like leaned my grow lights in between some baskets and hooked it up to power and put my fan over here. And I’m just hoping for the best right now. One thing we need to work on is yesterday I got this bed premoistened. So, put the Oyas in here and I actually put BTI in this reservoir. So there is one company where this guy his dad literally invented BTI and BTI is this all natural organic naturally found bacteria that you can grow I guess I’m sure it’s very proprietary but they’ve used it in agricultural applications for a very long time now. It’s the main ingredient in mosquito dunks if you’re familiar with those. So last year, I had taken mosquito dunks, soaked them in my watering can and used that water in the greenhouse to knock out the fungusnat larvae in the soil so I wouldn’t have a huge infestation in the greenhouse. And this year I was like, there has to be a better way. Actually got in contact with the son of the guy who invented this and he was super nice, super helpful. He actually put this custom sample size bag together for me. I don’t even know if this is something they offer yet or I think it’s something hopefully they’re going to be offering this year. This is not an ad. It was just one of those really fun connections that like I love about gardening is when people are just as passionate about something as you are. So, it’s super super concentrated BTI. So, you only need a tiny tiny bit to mix into your water. His suggestion was actually mix this into a sprayer which I will be doing, but I needed to get the soil pre-dampened because it was on the verge of like hydrophobic. I had let it sit in the beds without watering it for so long. So, I did end up starting to mix it into the watering can and just hand water the beds and slowly mix it in to keep it from getting hydrophobic. So, I still have to do the other two beds. And I’m just trying to get ahead of it this year because fungus nuts aren’t like super harmful to your plants. But, it’s just very irritating when they spiral out of control, especially like in an indoor space like a greenhouse. So, actually before the greenhouse gets too hot cuz it’s going to be in the 60s today, I think I’m going to try to get one more bed done. [Music] I was given very specific ratios. chose to do this in a 4 gallon sprayer. Obviously, I am not following that cuz it would literally This is like 2 gallons. I think it would be like hundredths of a gram or something and I’m just I can’t be bothered. So, hopefully it’s okay. I’m mixing it in this one just because it’s larger, but then I actually broke the rose off of it and I’m waiting for a replacement one to come in. Plus, this can leak a little. It’s just easier when I’m watering into something that’s hydrophobic to use something that still has a rose on it. All right, I put the onions outside just because they were taking up too much room on the table and they really don’t need to be inside anymore. Onions are super cold hearty. So, we did end up with about 72 onions. These are Patterson onions. If you missed that planting video, I will link it for you. We’re going to get these into the garden today. This is going to be the first full bed that we’re planting. Okay, I just had to check my math cuz I don’t trust my brain right now. But there’s a few different ways you can plant your onions depending on how much space you have and how much energy you want to expend. There’s a really interesting article, which I’ll try to link to for you in the description, where this market gardener was testing out different ways to space onions and to see if the yield was significantly different by planting multiple onions in one hole. Because most onion, like aliium type plants, you can plant multiple in one hole and they will do fine. And that means less work for me because I’m packing 36 onions into each of these 2×6 foot beds. And if I plant three in a hole, I only need to make 12 holes instead of 36 holes. So, it’s effectively cutting my work more than in half, which is great. And the yield seems to be about the same either way. Now, it doesn’t look like there’s a lot going on in this bed right now, but I did actually already plant a round of lettuce, radishes, and even some bok choy, some baby bok choy in here around the edges. So, we’re going to be working around that with our spacing. But since the onions are going to be here the longest, I want to try to get the spacing the most accurate as I can because once the radishes and lettuce and bok choy come out, I’m going to be putting another round of lettuce in here as well as some chamomile cuz that can be a really good companion plant for onions. But for just today, we’re just going to get these onions planted out. We’re going to do three in a hole and they are going to be 12 in apart into a rows. So, should be pretty easy. I’m just marking the center of the bed because I know I need six holes per half. So that way I can kind of better center things. For me, it’s worth potentially having a slightly smaller yield in order to get these in the ground a little bit faster. I don’t actually know how deep I need these holes to be right now or how wide. I’m going have to see how many roots are in each cell already. So, these are our little babies. Your onions may be quite a bit larger than this when you plant them out. And that’s fine as well. We’ve got some good root development. They’re starting to come out the bottom a little bit. So, with onions, they really don’t mind having their roots disturbed. I could kind of get rid of a lot of this soil and make it a little bit easier for myself. I’m just going to break off whatever soil is looser on the top and try to plant them at the same depth that they were in in the seed cell. And I’m doing just like a little triangle shape in my plants. Doesn’t look like much yet, but this bed just got a nice big feed of fertilizer. So, I’m hoping they’re going to grow really fast now. When you’re thinking about what you want to companion plant with your onions, it’s important to just consider that they are a root crop. So, they’re going to take up a lot of underground space. And you want to make sure whatever you’re planting with them isn’t going to be competing for that. You also want to make sure you’re planting them in a soil that’s really light and fluffy. It’s just going to make it easier for them to grow. Oh, looks like we lost one in this tray. Oops. I know I’m not the only one who’s going to be super excited about these purple trays, so I will link the shop for these down in the description. I think I’m going to experiment with a mulch in this bed that I have not really seen used a whole lot. I’m curious to see how it will work. Okay, I got the first bed planted out. I’m going to wait to plant this bed out cuz content creator problems. I need to actually film it vertically for that one. So, I’m just going to start mulching the first bed. And we’re going to be using sheep’s wool today. I can’t speak to how common this might have been in like indigenous practices or anything like that to use an animal pelt of some kind as a mulch, but it is slowly gaining popularity in more modern gardening cultures for very good reason. So, as much as 50% of all the wool that’s generated in the world is just thrown away because it’s not of a high enough quality to be used for fabric. Different sheep have different kind of quality of wool that is good for spinning into yarn and thread to weave. And I’ve mentioned a couple times before I spin my own yarn. If you’ve ever started spinning your own yarn, one of the most interesting phenomenons is as soon as people figure that out, bags, trash bags of wool, just start appearing in your house like constantly because there’s a lot of farmers, especially in rural areas like where I live, who are raising sheep for meat and are shearing them because you still have to shear them and they don’t know what to do with the wool and they don’t want to throw it away. So often times they will just give it to me, which is really great if I wanted to spin it, but it can be kind of difficult to spin. A lot of the time, even if it’s meant as like a sheep that could also function as a wool sheep, it’s just kind of really hard work. Like you have to deep clean it and all this. So, this particular fleece has been scoured, which means I’ve kind of gotten the first layer of like greasiness off of it and everything, and it’s no longer like dirty. I’ve taken all the the bad parts off of it by skirting it, which means you take kind of the outside edges of the fleece and just throw them away cuz they’re really not okay to use for yarn. But you’ll also see there’s a lot of vegetable matter caught up in the wool. And without the right machinery, this can be really hard to remove to make it good enough for spinning. So, it’s just a lot of work. And this particular fleece has been sitting for years. Like when I say like 10 years, I have not been spinning yarn for a while. So, it’s just been sitting and I haven’t wanted to throw it away. So, this year I figured we should try experimenting with using it as mulch in the garden because I’ve been reading a lot about this and it’s really interesting. Wool is really dense, so it’s very good at holding moisture in and keeping weeds out. And it also takes a pretty long time to biodegrade. That means that it’s a really long-lasting mulch. It also has microscopic barbs in it, which can deter slugs if that’s a problem that you deal with a lot. And deer don’t like the smell of it cuz it smells like livestock to them and they want to stay away from that. So, I’m not sure how this is going to work, but we’re going to give it a try. So, I use a lot of wood chip mulch on the ground in my garden, but I don’t like to use wood hit mulch in my bed because it actually pulls up nitrogen from the soil. Wool, it actually has nitrogen in it and it’s not going to pull up nitrogen from the soil. I’m a little concerned about doing this around a lot of tiny plants. I feel like it would be a lot easier in a bed that just had like established perennials in it or something like that cuz I really don’t want to choke out my little baby onions that I’ve just planted here. So, I’m having to be very careful going around them. This is a really dense fleece. And if you’re curious at all about spinning, this is what we call a lock. So, see how it’s all kind of one clump and all the crimps in it are going in the same direction. So, I kind of feel like I need to fluff it out a little bit as I go because otherwise it’ll be like too dense. I mean, in the middle I can make it a little bit thicker. It feels like it’s like locking down on the soil. This is one of the weirder things I’ve ever done in the garden. There’s something so meditative to me working with wool. I think I just need to like accept that it is clumpy. So, I just happened to have a white fleece or off-white fleece, but could have done a brown one and it would have kind of just blended in cuz this is like kind of crazy. Um, definitely a little bit harder to spread than like a straw mulch so far, but again, that’s going to depend on the fleece that you use. And I’m also like I started out fluffing it a lot and I’m doing less fluffing now because I just can’t be bothered. There’s a very good chance the birds are just going to see this and be like, “Oh my god, the perfect nest material. Thank you. Bye.” I wouldn’t be that mad about it, honestly, though. We need birds in the garden, too. This is definitely one of those do my neighbors think I’m crazy moments. I wonder too like as it gets rained on it’ll probably like felt itself and get even denser. And we are going to water this in. We always want to water in any of our transplants. So we will get to that. And I don’t I just it’s so tempting to be too particular here. And I need to just accept that it will not be perfect. I picked a very challenging bed to try this on cuz there’s so many little baby plants. I do want to fluff out a little bit cuz otherwise it I just don’t get as much to work with. Something about it just feels right though. like a good way to repurpose. Got my retractable hose reel back. Makes my life so much easier. Um, there’s a million cheap knockoffs of this. Don’t get them. I will link to the best one down below for you. Going really gentle string so it doesn’t move around too much at first. And wool is a little bit water repellent. So you’ll see it kind of beat up on the surface of it. And that’s okay. It’s going to get down in between onto the soil. Get really nice and damp. And we’ll see how this does for us. My sorrel is up. Almost time to make a nice big spring salad. And I forgot that I had also planted some onions in one of these milk jugs at the same time. And honestly, I think they might look even better than the ones I started indoors earlier. By far most frequently asked question about the winter sewing is how often do I water? The answer is never. I have not looked at this once since I planted it. So, let’s see what we’ve got. So, I planted snapdragons in here and onions. And honestly, these onions, they’re around the same size as the ones I planted a little bit before I planted these. And they just look healthier. Like, they’re thicker. They’re stockier. They’re a little bit more green. So, I don’t know. Maybe winter sew your onions. Like, this seems like the easiest way. I could have just dumped the whole packet in this jug and then split them up cuz they don’t mind being a little bit crowded. So, we have some extra onions. I don’t know where these are going to go cuz I definitely packed those beds full already with the 72 cells that I had planted in the greenhouse. This is why I always say nature finds a way. Nature wants to live and you don’t have to do all this work to make it happen. Like you can literally start your onions in trash and they will grow and be happy. No grow lights, nothing fancy. So, I think I’m going to grab some radishes and carrots and just do a quick second sewing on these because I did some a few weeks ago and I just want to have extra. I’m pretty bummed because I had soaked like a ton of snap pea seeds and put them along all the arches and none of them came up and I really can’t think why that would be pretty disappointing. So, I’m going to be putting bigger plants more about like 6 in in which means this edge is like wasted space, especially this time of year. So, just going to do like a quick row of radishes here just in this one bed because otherwise that’d be like way too many radishes. I’m doing French breakfast. They are my favorite. I have a few different varieties that I grow, but I think French breakfast is just the most interesting appearance-wise. I also really like to let my radishes go to seed. I honestly think the seed pod harvest is even better. And there’s types you can get specifically for that. I believe it’s called rat tail. I’ve never grown it, but you get so much more that way. And they kind of taste like snap peas. Like they’re just green and crunchy. And then I have a packet of carrot seeds. That’s like five different carrot seeds that I all mixed together in one packet and I’ve just been chaos sewing everywhere. So like even though this says dragon on it, there’s more than just dragon and carrots in here. And with the carrot seeds, I do Magg’s method. I don’t cover them or anything. I just kind of hope for the best that I’m planting them in the rainy season and hopefully they will get enough moisture in order to germinate because carrots can be really tricky. They have to be surface sewn cuz they’re so tiny. And when you surface sew them, they don’t stay damp. But carrots in particular have to stay damp in order to germinate. This is like kind of silly if you think about it. I don’t know how they survive in the wild. So, oh my god. I will just overse the edges here cuz again, these will stay out of the way even when I put in my main plantings because the carrots will be here quite a bit longer. The radishes I’ll be harvesting in like 30 40 days. But a lot of these will take like 75 days. I swear the seedlings in the greenhouse go from damp to too dry in like half a second. So these need some water. I use the most rain water out of this barrel at this time of year because I don’t really usually have the hose link hooked up. I just hooked it up so it’s easier. Especially when I’m just doing a little bit like a tray of seedlings inside. I like to use a watering can and the rain barrel. I can link the rain barrel down in the description for you. Just need a little bit. This is the cotton that I’m starting for the fiber garden. It’s uh not looking great. Think one came up. Oh well. And then I like to bottom water my seedlings. And these are the really shallow trays, so I’ll fill them up all the way. Probably have to give it another fill, too. This is just better for the seedlings overall and keeps them from getting a ton of diseases. All right, I’m going to wrap it up here for today. Thank you so much for gardening with me. Let me know if you have any questions down in the comments. And make sure you hit the like and subscribe button so you don’t miss future videos like this one.